i’d really recommend just buying the shield. people have put work into it to make it easy to use, and nobody is making a profit from it.
norns-image will reqire many hours of messing around for it to work with other hardware. these things will all be points of pain:
- getting the norns graphics on the HDMI output
- working with different soundcard
- emulating expected GPIO input
(maybe someone else on this thread will help you, but tehn and i are focused on making norns stack work with the hardware for which it was designed.)
that said… you should be able to get the lua interpreter (matron) and the audio backend (crone) working on pretty much any linux system: just install jack, supercollider, lua, and build dependencies. (IMHO this will not give you much sense of how it feels to use the norns scripts, which are designed around the I/O hardware available on norns/shield, but depending on your interests it may still be educational.)
for the particular issue you reference: just make sure your supercollider install is OK (you can run sclang, boot a Server, and make sounds) and create the user extensions dir by hand before installing the norns SC classes.